Overcoming Remote Desktop Challenges with SPONSORED BY A BWW Media Group Brand By Michael Otey Michael Otey is president of TECA, Inc., which focuses on Windows and SQL Server product development and consulting. He is a frequent contributor to technical publications and the author of several books on database development and programming. In today’s corporate environment IT administrators typically need to manage many different remote systems. These systems can be physical systems or they might be VMs. Many times, these systems reside locally as well as in remote locations and in the cloud. For Windows IT administrators the Remote Desktop is the primary tool that the vast majority of IT administrators use every day for these necessary remote management tasks. Remote Desktop enables you to start an interactive session with a remote system that has been configured to allow Remote Desktop access. Remote Desktop opens a window on your local system that contains the desktop of the remote system that you connect to. Your mouse and keyboard actions are sent to the remote system and the interactive session allows you to operate and troubleshoot the remote system very much like you are sitting at a local display. This kind of control and interactive display is essential when you’re trying to troubleshoot problems or configure systems remotely. Overcoming Remote Desktop Challenges with Remote Desktop Manager In this whitepaper you’ll learn about some of the challenges of using Remote Desktop to manage your enterprise servers and then see some of the best ways that you can address these issues. Many companies use Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Manager for their remote Windows management requirements. However, Remote Desktop Connection Manager has several critical limitations in an enterprise desktop environment. You’ll see how you can address these limitations as well as how Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager provides an enterprise-ready feature set to address your remote management requirements. 3 Remote Desktop Management Challenges While managing remote desktops is an essential daily task for most IT administrators it also presents some difficult challenges. Let’s take a closer look at the some of the three main remote desktop management challenges. • Managing multiple connections - One of the biggest challenges with Remote Desktop is managing and organizing multiple remote connections. Most administrators in medium and larger companies need to connect to dozens if not hundreds of remote systems which can be very difficult to manage. Using RDP files enables you to save your connection settings and optionally your authentication information. This works great for a few systems but it quickly gets very messy and potentially confusing when the number of remote connections grow into dozens or more. Attempting to manually manage connections can result in a lack of standardization, confusion and potential errors. • Securing your remote connections – The next biggest remote desktop management challenge is properly securing the remote connections. Just like a traditional desktop environment, passwords are your first line of defense in securing your corporate infrastructure. All accounts with access to Remote Desktop Connections need to require strong passwords. To simplify management, some companies attempt to use the same passwords for multiple accounts – or worse resort to yellow sticky notes -- which can create a huge security exposure. You need to ensure that your remote management network connections, passwords, and credentials are all secure. In addition, when you’re dealing with multiple remote systems and access by many different IT personal you need a way of logging access to those systems for auditing and troubleshooting. • Connecting to Linux and other heterogeneous hosts - One of the other challenges with remote desktop management is connecting to heterogeneous host systems. Today very few companies only have Windows systems to manage. Instead, most business are using a mix of Windows, Linux, Mac and other non-Windows systems. For most Windows administrators this means they need to use multiple remote management tools. Remote Desktop is limited to the RDP protocol which for the most part restricts its use to Windows systems. While some Linux distributions can be managed with RDP most cannot. This often requires that the administrator has to incorporate multiple tools like VNC, Putty and Apple Remote Desktop in addition to Windows Remote Desktop. There are several different paths that you can take to clear these hurdles in remote desktop management. You can try to manually organization multiple .rdp files into separate folders with different permission but this can be extremely cumbersome and difficult for large numbers of connections. Instead, many businesses opt to use Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Manager or a third party remote desktop manger like Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager to more effectively manage their remote desktop connections. Let’s take a closer look at using Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Manager and Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager to handle your remote connection requirements. Overcoming Remote Desktop Challenges with Remote Desktop Manager Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Manager One tool that many IT administrators use to help manage their remote desktop management needs is Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Manager. Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Manager (RDCMan) is a free download and it can help you to manage multiple remote desktop connections by centralizing all of your remote desktop connections under a single management console. RDCMan is supported on Windows 10 Tech Preview (Windows 10), Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server Tech Preview (Windows Server 2016). RDCMan is a basic tool whose main purpose is to help you to organize remote connections under a single console. You can see an example of Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Connection Manager in Figure 1. Figure 1 – Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Manager 5 As you can see in Figure 1 RDCMan allows you to create groups of different remote systems that you can connect to. Each group is stored in a separate .rdg file which can be exported and shared by other users. It’s important to realize that these are all separate files which can make implementing batch changes and sharing them with multiple users very cumbersome. RDCMan also offers the ability to encrypt your stored credentials using certificates. Remote connections have the ability to inherit settings from the group they are part of or you can customize each remote session. By default, the remote display is rendered in the main frame of the RCDMan console but you also have the option of undocking the remote session. RCDMan is primarily a Windows management tool. It can use RDP to connect to remote Windows sessions and it can also connect to Hyper-V VM console sessions using VMConnect. RDCMan is adequate for a managing a small number of systems. Unfortunately, it has a number of significant limitations when used in a medium, large business and enterprise scenarios. Some of the main limitations for RCDMan include: • No support for Linux and Mac desktops - RDC is primarily designed to be a Windows-only management tool and it doesn’t support the full range of heterogenous servers that are in most businesses today. • It is not officially supported by Microsoft – One important thing than many administrators don’t realize is that RDCMan is not an official Microsoft product and it is not supported by Microsoft nor is it kept current. The last update for RDCMan was in 2014. • Manual credential entry – RDCMan requires you to manually enter the credential data for your remote sessions. This can be time consuming and can result in errors. • Remote Desktop only – RDCMan does not provide any other additional networking tools or capabilities. Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager Most businesses have remote desktop management needs that go beyond the basic capabilities provided by Microsoft’s free offering. Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager (RDM) provides the ability to manage multiple remote desktop connections. In addition, RDM offers a far more extensive set of tools and enterprise-level management capabilities then Microsoft’s RDCMan. Let’s take a closer look at some of the main remote management capabilities and tools offered by RDM. First, RDM is supported on almost all of today’s popular Windows desktop and server platforms including: Windows Vista SP2, Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows Server 2008 SP2, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, and Windows Server 2016. The latest version Overcoming Remote Desktop Challenges with Remote Desktop Manager also requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.6. There are both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of RDM. RDM provides a modern interface that makes use of a ribbon menu and a tabbed interface for each open remote session. You can see Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager in Figure 2. Figure 2 – Devolutions Remote Desktop Manager RDM is basically divided into a Navigation pane that you can see on the left side of Figure 2 and the Context Area that you can see on the right. The Navigation pane contains entries which can be remote desktop sessions like you can see in Figure 2 or it can contain a number of other types of entries such as Credentials, Contacts, Documents and Macro/Script/Tools. You can quickly create multiple entries by right clicking on an entry and then selecting Duplicate Entry from the context menu. You can optionally change the default view in the Navigation pane from the node-tree style view that you see in Figure 2 to a tiled view or a details view. The Content Area is used to display different remote desktop sessions as well as the output of the various embedded commands and tools that are part of RDM.